Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) uses the latest trends in software architecture and development to achieve increased availability, capacity use efficiency, and performance. ECS uses a specific method for disk capacity management. Disk space is partitioned into a set of blocks of fixed size called chunks. User data is stored in these chunks and the chunks are shared. One chunk can contain fragments of several user objects. Chunk content is modified in an append mode. When chunks become full, they are sealed and the content of sealed chunks is immutable.
There are different types of chunks, one type per capacity user. In particular, user data is stored in repository chunks. All the metadata is stored in tree-like structures. These trees are stored in tree chunks. Chunks of each type are shared. For instance, one repository chunk can contain segments of several user objects, and one tree chunk can contain elements of several trees. This approach assures high write performance and capacity efficiency.
The above-described background relating to ECS is merely intended to provide a contextual overview of some current issues, and is not intended to be exhaustive. Other contextual information may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.